As temperatures warm up in the Northern Hemisphere, one’s mind naturally turns to the outdoors and the garden — even if some of our gardens are still snow-covered. One secret to good gardening is that many of the plants we love take too long to grow if started from seed outside, at least in relatively […]
2000 m above ground level (AGL), winds are stronger and much, much more consistent than they are at surface. Even if the Earth were a perfect sphere, there’d be a sluggish boundry layer at the surface, but since it’s got all these interesting bumps and bits and bobs, it’s not just sluggish but horribly turbulent, […]
Water wells are simple things, but that doesn’t mean they are maintenance-free. It can be important to monitor water levels in a well, and that gets complicated when the well is remote. Commercial solutions exist, of course, but tend to be expensive and even impractical in some cases. That’s where [Hans Gaensbauer]’s low-cost, buoyancy-based well […]
Everyone here can think of a cloud-connected product that was killed because the company that made it stopped supporting it. While these corporations have forgotten their products, the US PIRG Education Fund has immortalized them in their Electronic Waste Graveyard. With an estimated “130,000,000 pounds of electronic waste” produced since 2014, the amount of wasted […]
Recently, [Vinnie] aka [vinthewrench] moved from Oregon to Arkansas to start a farmstead. This is a style of farming that focuses not just on a profitable farm where produce is sold at market, but also on a homestead where much of one’s own food is grown on the farm as well. Like any farm, though, […]
The concept of building your own hydroelectric generator seems simple at face value: use gravity to impart as much force as possible onto a turbine, which spins a generator, thus generating electricity. If you’re like the bloke over at [FarmCraft101] trying to DIY this with your farm pond and a lot of PVC pipes, you […]
In my country, we have a saying: the sun is a deadly lazer. Well, it’s not so much a folk saying as a meme, and not so much in one country as “the internet”. In any case, [LiamTronix] was feeling those cancer rays this harvest season when running his electric tractor, and realized that– since […]
There’s folk wisdom in just about every culture that teaches about renewable energy — things like “make hay while the sun shines”. But as an industrial culture, we want to make hay 24/7 and not be at the whims of some capricious weather god! Alas, renewable energy puts a crimp in that. Once again, energy […]
Probably most people know that when organic matter such as kitchen waste rots, it can produce flammable methane. As a source of free energy it’s attractive, but making a biogas plant sounds difficult, doesn’t it? Along comes [My engines] with a well-thought-out biogas plant that seems within the reach of most of us. It’s based […]
Today’s pressurized water reactors (PWRs) are marvels of nuclear fission technology that enable gigawatt-scale power stations in a very compact space. Though they are extremely safe, with only the TMI-2 accident releasing a negligible amount of radioactive isotopes into the environment per the NRC, the company Deep Fission reckons that they can make PWRs even […]